12. John Garing

John Garing powwowed with such luminaries as Amazon's Werner Vogels and Salesforce.com's Marc Benioff to bring cloud computing, network services, and Web 2.0 tools to the Department of Defense. Garing's biggest challenge: overcoming the "box hugging" impulse to control servers, data, and process. His version of cloud computing, called RACE (rapid-access computing environment), acts as an open-source innovation lab for military developers, complete with peer-review certification. "Projects that used to take seven months to approve now take a matter of days," he says. — by Ellen McGirt